Archiving Email

Clicking on the Archive button will bring up this sheet:

MailSteward will automatically set the beginning date to the date of the most recent email archived in the database. Any email prior to that date will be skipped. This will save time if you have already processed email prior to a given date. Or you can set the date to "All" for month, day, and year, and MailSteward will process all of the email in your account(s).

You can also set an ending date. This can be useful if you want to, for example, just store all of the email prior to 2004. Clicking on the Reset All button will reset the beginning and ending dates to "All".

Once you have chosen a beginning date and/or ending date, and clicked on the Archive button, MailSteward will begin processing your locally stored email and archiving it into the database. If you have a .mac or other imap account, you must set the account options to keep copies of your email on your local computer. MailSteward does not access email on remote servers. Duplicate email is automatically skipped. If an email is already in the database, it is not archived. However, if the mailbox has changed, or the email tags have changed, they will be updated in the database.

While the email is being archived, this window provides continuous feedback:

Clicking on the Stop button will stop the Store operation and save all of the email in the database that has been processed so far. It can take a litte while sometimes to finish processing, so don't worry if it takes a little while for the Stop button to take effect.

When all of the email has been archived in the database, a window will appear showing some stats about the email that has been archived. This information will also be logged in the archive history file. You can view the archive history by choosing "Archive History" from the File menu.

MailSteward will store the plain text, html, raw source, and, optionally, the attachments of your email. Once MailSteward is done archiving the email, you can:

Launch or save the attachments of individual emails.
Add tags to email.
Reply to an email.
Forward an email.
Print the email list.
Print the individual selected email
Print all the email in the list.
Save the email list.
Save the individual selected email.
Save all the email in the list.
Save the selected emails to PDF files.
Save the raw source of the selected email.
Save the raw source of all the email in the list.
Save all the attachments of selected emails as separate files.
Delete the selected email from the list.
Delete the selected email from the database & the list.
Delete all of the email in the list, from the database.
Delete attachments of the selected email in the list, from the database.
View the raw source of the selected email.
Export email to a tab-delimited text file, a new MailSteward database file, an mbox file, or an SQL file.

If an email has attachments or an HTML or enriched text version that has been saved in the database, a list of the attachments will appear at the bottom of the email text as a blue, underlined link beneath the title ATTACHMENTS:. Clicking on the link of an attachment will allow you to launch the attachment using the appropriate application, or save the attachment as a file. If an email has both plain text and HTML versions, the plain text will appear in the body text panel, and the HTML version will be listed as an attachment below in the attachments panel. Clicking on the link will cause the HTML version to be rendered and displayed in the body text panel, instead of the plain text. The number of attachments for each email appears in the ATCH column.

You can view the raw source of the selected email by clicking on the Raw button

in the upper right corner.